Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Very good point. I got a set of over-the-ear ear-buds that let me here the audio-book without blocking traffic sounds. Driving while listening works for me. As I write this post, my wife is reading in bed, and I'm about to go back there with my audio-book on my phone. She'll be reading, and I'll be starring around, sometimes at her, sometimes at the ceiling... but what the heck, we're all true geeks here, right?
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
They are hard at work at it, but no, Orca does not yet work with QT4. Something about a 'dbus' interface that has to be written. On the positive side, it sounds like initial support is very close, probably just one more release away. I'm working on a QT4 app at work right now, and Orca can't do anything with it. Trolltech has been promising Linux support for screen readers for years, but this time, I think it will actually happen. I installed Kubuntu 9.04 last month. After finding it wouldn't run Orca, I wiped the disk and installed normal Ubuntu.
I also have had to use speech recognition to control my computer. For three years, I couldn't type. I wrote most of the first version of the Synplify HDL Analyst by voice. Now that I've got it talking back to me, I want to build a conversational computer interface. Something like Star Trek... "Computer! How long before this laptop explodes from the weight of all the stupid slashdot comments I've posted?" Elisa responds: "Don't you know anything?"
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Get any PDF, HTML, TXT, etc. Copy and paste it into gedit. Orca does a great job reading from gedit.
Creating the mp3 is trickier. Save the TXT file from gedit. Then, strip all the UTF-8 characters, like "circumflex", which is easy: just strip all the characters with the high bit set using a simple C program called stripUtf8. Then, use a customised version of the Voxin 'say' program to create the.wav, and 'lame -V2 file.wav' to create the mp3. To use the 'say' program, you'll need to pay under $10 to a non-profit in the UK. I hate to sound like a add for them, but that's the only legal way to get it cheap.
I've put the source for stripUtf8 and my customised 'say' program here.
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's taken me about six weeks and 7 books to get here. I started at about my normal reading speed, around 250wpm, which sounded really fast. Audio books are normally around 170wpm. After each book, the words start sounding really slow, so I sped it up. There are several tricks. First, use Eloquence (Voxin on Linux), since it's easy to understand at high speed. Second, always use the same voice. You're ear is good at understanding speaker-independent speech, but it's even better at learning a specific voice. I'd bet most people here on slashdot could understand speech at this speed after a similar effort.
Unfortunately for me, learning to understand even faster than this is going to be harder. I don't have any problem understanding individual words at higher speed, but I start losing comprehension. My brain isn't wired to assemble concepts that fast. A blind friend of mine has solid comprehension at over 800wpm, which is just amazing, but he's been blind since childhood, and he's freaking brilliant. He says I could eventually get near his speed, though I'm doubtful.
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, "words" are a bit fuzzy. Openoffice reports this text as 925 words. This is an mp3 of Orca reading it, which lasts 120 seconds. It's fun to listen to. I'm on my 7th novel in 4 weeks, which I play in the car, at the doctor's office, or anywhere else that's normally down time.
Re:Is this the KDE 4.0 we've all been waiting for?
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm afraid I wont get personally excited about any KDE release until they get it working with the Orca screen reader, which works very well with Gnome.
I only read at 250 words per minute, but my listening speed is now at 460wpm for reading fiction, and over 500wpm for Orca reading web pages. I have a blind friend who listens to his computer at 860wpm. This is very cool stuff, so it's a shame KDE is late to the game.
I once had a bear do exactly that! We were camping at Merced Lake in Yosemite, and had six-man-weeks of food for three of us to take a two week backpacking trip. We put it 20' up a tree, on the end of a 10' limb. In the middle of the night, we heard loud stomping sounds, a bunch of scrapping sounds, then a rope-through-pulley sound, and a loud crash. A damned black bear had jumped from the tree, caught our food bag on the way down, using our rope to slow his crash, and squashed a small tree when he landed.
My friend had a great idea. "Let's go get our food back." I don't know how I let him talk me and my other buddy into it, or why I was the one in front with a dying flash light, as we followed the munching sounds into the woods. Suddenly, the bear stood up on both back legs with his arms out, and I don't know if the roar I heard was the bear, or just the blood rushing to my head. I turned around to ask if we should run, but there was no one there! I caught up to my brave friends at the lake, where we discussed wading into the freezing cold lake vs. making a stand there.
I must say, it didn't occur to me to check out the bear's penis, but he was waving everything else at me!
And, don't forget Algenol. Ethanol from algae seems to be a fairly hot area. It will probably only take sustained > $100/bbl oil, and it will take off.
There is confusion (caused on purpose by the pro-oil community) about what we mean by "smart grid". We need a high voltage DC grid to transmit wind energy from the Rockies to New York. This isn't "smart", in fact, it's old dumb technology from the 70's that we've improved marginally. We need this grid so that we can plug any kind of energy generation into it from anywhere, without concern for where it's used. Discussions of a "smart" grid are about a whole other problem - that our current grid is way out of date and needs a face-lift. So long as we get the HVDC grid, I'm happy.
The big-oil/RNC/neocons are using their time-proven strategy of re-labeling. By defining "smart grid" as something utilities and big-oil want, they can take over the push for the HVDC grid and instead create yet another huge give-away for huge corporations. It's just like when they redefined "network neutrality" as an evil plot by Silicon Valley to take your money.
Interesting speculations, though I see it a bit differently. I don't know about Windows 7. The last MS OS I used extensively was Windows 2000. However, I think Google Chrome OS hasn't got a chance in hell. I use several Google services, like gmail, but the reason is that they allow me to access the same data across devices. Why would we want our local data to reside in the cloud?
As for linux, it's for hackers. Ubuntu and a couple other distros try to be linux for Windows users, but it never quite makes it. Nothing is going to kill MS, other than possibly MS, so long as they focus on the needs of not-very-smart people.
Of course, there could be something completely unexpected out there. What if Apple suddenly decided to sell their OS for $50 and let it run on any Intel box?
The technology is proven, but dangerous (the pilot plants have terrible records with fires), and super expensive. It's cheaper currently to build out with solar and wind. However, you're correct about the fuel. My take is we should fix what's wrong with current nuclear, and build out nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. If we store the fuel in Yucca Mountain for a few decades, it may become economical to reprocess the fuel as you suggest.
Anyway, the economics professor who wrote this article hasn't got a clue. The high-voltage grid is decades old proven technology. CCS is still a pipe-dream. If we're to make progress today, we need the HVDC grid, and then we can all argue about what to power it with.
In 2007, we installed 8 gigawatts of wind power in the US, more than all other new electrical installations combined. PV and other solar may not be "baseload" ready, but it's output is wonderfully correlated with peak demand. In power infrastructure, it's all about peak load.
There are already nearly 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. alone, and the people being served by them seem generally fine with it and do not fear it.
Give me a break. The Sharon Harris plant 17 miles from my house has a great carbon footprint, but scares the locals out of their minds. It doesn't help that we have morons guarding the place, and a huge pool of radioactive waste, like a giant "Get Your Terrorist Stuff Here!" sign.
Now, if we could get past the stupid politics, and properly deal with the waste, that would be a huge step forward. Next, if we could protect the containment dome from jet planes (totally doable), then we wouldn't have to worry about a containment breech. The new plant they will build here has passive cooling, which is also huge - the old plant melts down if it loses power, because the core requires active cooling.
It's not nuclear power that scares me or many of those who live here. It's the morons in control of them.
The Gnome screen reader - Orca - is developed by Sun for OpenSolaris. For me, and others facing visual impairment, this is a biggie. Hopefully, if OpenSolaris does fall by the wayside, Oracle will keeps some of the gems like Orca, and port them to Oracle's version of Linux.
However, this is all very scary. Oracle has not been known as a good open-source contributor, like Sun or IBM. Now they own mysql, Orca, Java, and a ton of key open-source technologies, not to mention OpenSolaris.
The number of bits in a petabyte: 9*10^15. Age of the universe in seconds: 4*10^18. So, a room with 480 of these servers could hold that much data. My entire life, I've used the age of the universe in seconds as a number so huge, that we could just assume nothing would ever approach it.
The meaning of life: you contribute on the order of 1 bit towards the evolution of the human genome. Kinda makes me feel small.
So... Microsoft having potential patent claims against your free compiler doesn't bother you? How about even using a "portable" language defined and controlled by Microsoft? Sure, if you only care about Windows, use C#. But Microsoft has a long history of jerking around standards that it controls to make them impossible for competitors to adopt. Consider Internet Explorer, and all the pain we have to go through to be compatible with that beast. How about Microsoft's attack on Open Document Format, and it's insanely huge and complex competing standard which only Microsoft implements? I think RMS has a valid point, and deserves consideration. This is a good place to air such discussions.
I suffer like the author of this thread from trouble getting started on projects. I'm actually in such a state right now. I find music helps a ton, especially earphones that block out other noises. Usually, there's some boring task I have to do to before I get to the fun parts, and I put off that boring stuff as long as possible. At the moment, I just spent nearly two weeks figuring out how to run my computer without vision (I'm losing my central vision). I needed to learn this skill, but of course, my manager would rather that I schedule such time, rather than drop his task for two weeks straight. I'm suppose to be writing tree-control crud. Yuk.
The trick is just getting started. I think I'll stop reading slashdot and try and be productive.
BYD F3DM is a hybrid, and only sold in China to the government and corporations. The Mitsubishi MiEV is still in research phase, and I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a US version The Subaru Stella EV is still only a concept car, though it may be sold soon in Japan. Again, good luck getting one here. AC Propulsion E-Box? Seriously? It's a $55K conversion kit, not a car, and it converts a crummy $15K car into a crummy $70K car. Subaru Stella is not yet in production, and it'll be a long time before we get to buy them.
So long as we're talking about cool future technologies, I'd include the Volt and Aptera. I hope all these companies make it, but high-volume production is key. Tesla has the lead in this area, and they're further along at developing the technology than any other company.
Tesla is the only company in the world selling production electric cars that are fully street-legal. They started with a $100K car, and now they're doing a $50K car. They have a $30K car planned for after that.
Basically, you need economies of scale to get the cost of these cars down. Tesla's riding that curve, and plans to eventually have cheaper cars than Ford. This is a potentially great place to invest in American innovation, not to mention the environmental benefits or jobs.
Just because I can embed video and sound doesn't make my HTML pages the equivalent of flash. More importantly, Microsoft has "announced" intension to support HTML 5, but there's exactly zero movement so far from the market leader, and a long history of similar unfulfilled promises. Until Microsoft says HTML 5 is the next big thing, it isn't. Sorry, I know it sucks.
The article asks for things that are very hard to deliver.
I was disabled in that I for three years, from 1996 to 1999, I couldn't type due to an entrapment of my ulnar nerves in both elbows. This resulted from using two-key combinations in emacs for years, at break-neck speed, and keeping my elbows bent sharply to reach up to a keyboard. My thumbs would swell up to 50% larger than their normal volume, and anything that touched them caused a lot of pain. Driving, washing my hair, and doing shirt buttons all became painful tasks. The doctor measured a nerve speed degradation through my elbows of something like 50%. He recommended disability, as I'm sure most doctors do.
Instead, since I worked for a great employer at the time (Synplicity), I was allowed to spend "whatever you need" to set up an environment at work where I could continue to function as a programmer. I was given a quiet office, and quiet PC (some of them are damned loud!), the best microphones, and speech recognition software - Dragon Dictate at the time, and later Naturally Speaking. I found I could "mouse" with an Alps touchpad, which sometimes I used with my knuckles. That mouse ability was key, as speech control of 2D position still sucked by 1999. I ran emacs under cygwin (which I could use to control Linux boxes when needed), and wrote 1,600 emacs macros over the 3 year period to improve my job efficiency (by voice). The initial version of HDL Analyst was written almost entirely by voice, as was almost all my work over those years. I was able to get my productivity up to about 80% of what I had when I typed, by my best estimates (lines of code/day, etc).
Here's what I found about voice programming.
1 - It's really hard to talk while solving hard programming problems in your head. Try talking to your friend while coding - it sucks. However, voice coding can become mechanical, just like typing, so you don't have to think about it. This feat alone is at least as hard as learning to type, which is one reason I feel voice controlled systems haven't caught on. 2 - Controlling my specific environment eventually took 1,600 custom commands. If you know 1,600 words in a foreign language, you've got decent grasp of it. So, learning to control your environment by voice is about as difficult as learning a foreign language. 3 - Emacs was part of what caused my injury, but also required for the solution! Without emacs, I don't know what I would have done. 4 - My 1,600 macros are a very personal language. Voice programmers try to share our work, but it's not very useful - we just keep trying to teach each other our own unique language.
There is room for improvement. Context sensitive voice programming where commands being recognized know where the cursor is, and the BNF syntax of the format you're editing would be huge.
Now, for what actually "cured" me (I still have to keep typing below a certain limit per day) - I got married and had a daughter. Wherever my baby was, I wanted to be, so I set up a laptop with Naturally Speaking, and followed her around. The keys on the keyboard have less travel, and cushions at the bottom (not all do!). My elbows are straighter. My stress just evaporated every time I looked at my daughter (most RSI injuries happen during high stress periods - after my divorce in my case). One day I noticed that typing the damned password into Windows stopped hurting, and little by little, I regained typing ability.
Unfortunately for me, it turns out I also have a very rare eye problem, and am going slowly blind (it's similar to macular degeneration). Anyone out there still a successful partially blind programmer? This is a field where I would be willing to volunteer while still able to program.
Thanks for the good advice, which I intend to take. I'm gonna have my wife (a professional writer) go over the site carefully, and then I'll start trying to get people in Carrboro involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point. I got a set of over-the-ear ear-buds that let me here the audio-book without blocking traffic sounds. Driving while listening works for me. As I write this post, my wife is reading in bed, and I'm about to go back there with my audio-book on my phone. She'll be reading, and I'll be starring around, sometimes at her, sometimes at the ceiling... but what the heck, we're all true geeks here, right?
They are hard at work at it, but no, Orca does not yet work with QT4. Something about a 'dbus' interface that has to be written. On the positive side, it sounds like initial support is very close, probably just one more release away. I'm working on a QT4 app at work right now, and Orca can't do anything with it. Trolltech has been promising Linux support for screen readers for years, but this time, I think it will actually happen. I installed Kubuntu 9.04 last month. After finding it wouldn't run Orca, I wiped the disk and installed normal Ubuntu.
I also have had to use speech recognition to control my computer. For three years, I couldn't type. I wrote most of the first version of the Synplify HDL Analyst by voice. Now that I've got it talking back to me, I want to build a conversational computer interface. Something like Star Trek... "Computer! How long before this laptop explodes from the weight of all the stupid slashdot comments I've posted?" Elisa responds: "Don't you know anything?"
Get any PDF, HTML, TXT, etc. Copy and paste it into gedit. Orca does a great job reading from gedit.
Creating the mp3 is trickier. Save the TXT file from gedit. Then, strip all the UTF-8 characters, like "circumflex", which is easy: just strip all the characters with the high bit set using a simple C program called stripUtf8. Then, use a customised version of the Voxin 'say' program to create the .wav, and 'lame -V2 file.wav' to create the mp3. To use the 'say' program, you'll need to pay under $10 to a non-profit in the UK. I hate to sound like a add for them, but that's the only legal way to get it cheap.
I've put the source for stripUtf8 and my customised 'say' program here.
It's taken me about six weeks and 7 books to get here. I started at about my normal reading speed, around 250wpm, which sounded really fast. Audio books are normally around 170wpm. After each book, the words start sounding really slow, so I sped it up. There are several tricks. First, use Eloquence (Voxin on Linux), since it's easy to understand at high speed. Second, always use the same voice. You're ear is good at understanding speaker-independent speech, but it's even better at learning a specific voice. I'd bet most people here on slashdot could understand speech at this speed after a similar effort.
Unfortunately for me, learning to understand even faster than this is going to be harder. I don't have any problem understanding individual words at higher speed, but I start losing comprehension. My brain isn't wired to assemble concepts that fast. A blind friend of mine has solid comprehension at over 800wpm, which is just amazing, but he's been blind since childhood, and he's freaking brilliant. He says I could eventually get near his speed, though I'm doubtful.
Well, "words" are a bit fuzzy. Openoffice reports this text as 925 words. This is an mp3 of Orca reading it, which lasts 120 seconds. It's fun to listen to. I'm on my 7th novel in 4 weeks, which I play in the car, at the doctor's office, or anywhere else that's normally down time.
I'm afraid I wont get personally excited about any KDE release until they get it working with the Orca screen reader, which works very well with Gnome.
I only read at 250 words per minute, but my listening speed is now at 460wpm for reading fiction, and over 500wpm for Orca reading web pages. I have a blind friend who listens to his computer at 860wpm. This is very cool stuff, so it's a shame KDE is late to the game.
Sweet! Sounds like a fun company with a bright future.
I once had a bear do exactly that! We were camping at Merced Lake in Yosemite, and had six-man-weeks of food for three of us to take a two week backpacking trip. We put it 20' up a tree, on the end of a 10' limb. In the middle of the night, we heard loud stomping sounds, a bunch of scrapping sounds, then a rope-through-pulley sound, and a loud crash. A damned black bear had jumped from the tree, caught our food bag on the way down, using our rope to slow his crash, and squashed a small tree when he landed.
My friend had a great idea. "Let's go get our food back." I don't know how I let him talk me and my other buddy into it, or why I was the one in front with a dying flash light, as we followed the munching sounds into the woods. Suddenly, the bear stood up on both back legs with his arms out, and I don't know if the roar I heard was the bear, or just the blood rushing to my head. I turned around to ask if we should run, but there was no one there! I caught up to my brave friends at the lake, where we discussed wading into the freezing cold lake vs. making a stand there.
I must say, it didn't occur to me to check out the bear's penis, but he was waving everything else at me!
And, don't forget Algenol. Ethanol from algae seems to be a fairly hot area. It will probably only take sustained > $100/bbl oil, and it will take off.
Yes, the "smart grid" goals have been drafted by the utility industry. I'm ok with that, so long as it's not confused with the HVDC grid.
The problem is that people are attacking the HVDC grid, using valid concerns about the "smart" grid.
There is confusion (caused on purpose by the pro-oil community) about what we mean by "smart grid". We need a high voltage DC grid to transmit wind energy from the Rockies to New York. This isn't "smart", in fact, it's old dumb technology from the 70's that we've improved marginally. We need this grid so that we can plug any kind of energy generation into it from anywhere, without concern for where it's used. Discussions of a "smart" grid are about a whole other problem - that our current grid is way out of date and needs a face-lift. So long as we get the HVDC grid, I'm happy.
The big-oil/RNC/neocons are using their time-proven strategy of re-labeling. By defining "smart grid" as something utilities and big-oil want, they can take over the push for the HVDC grid and instead create yet another huge give-away for huge corporations. It's just like when they redefined "network neutrality" as an evil plot by Silicon Valley to take your money.
How about an app-store, like the iPhone? It amazes me that a company so focused on profits has missed this obvious money bag.
Interesting speculations, though I see it a bit differently. I don't know about Windows 7. The last MS OS I used extensively was Windows 2000. However, I think Google Chrome OS hasn't got a chance in hell. I use several Google services, like gmail, but the reason is that they allow me to access the same data across devices. Why would we want our local data to reside in the cloud?
As for linux, it's for hackers. Ubuntu and a couple other distros try to be linux for Windows users, but it never quite makes it. Nothing is going to kill MS, other than possibly MS, so long as they focus on the needs of not-very-smart people.
Of course, there could be something completely unexpected out there. What if Apple suddenly decided to sell their OS for $50 and let it run on any Intel box?
The technology is proven, but dangerous (the pilot plants have terrible records with fires), and super expensive. It's cheaper currently to build out with solar and wind. However, you're correct about the fuel. My take is we should fix what's wrong with current nuclear, and build out nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. If we store the fuel in Yucca Mountain for a few decades, it may become economical to reprocess the fuel as you suggest.
Anyway, the economics professor who wrote this article hasn't got a clue. The high-voltage grid is decades old proven technology. CCS is still a pipe-dream. If we're to make progress today, we need the HVDC grid, and then we can all argue about what to power it with.
In 2007, we installed 8 gigawatts of wind power in the US, more than all other new electrical installations combined. PV and other solar may not be "baseload" ready, but it's output is wonderfully correlated with peak demand. In power infrastructure, it's all about peak load.
Give me a break. The Sharon Harris plant 17 miles from my house has a great carbon footprint, but scares the locals out of their minds. It doesn't help that we have morons guarding the place, and a huge pool of radioactive waste, like a giant "Get Your Terrorist Stuff Here!" sign.
Now, if we could get past the stupid politics, and properly deal with the waste, that would be a huge step forward. Next, if we could protect the containment dome from jet planes (totally doable), then we wouldn't have to worry about a containment breech. The new plant they will build here has passive cooling, which is also huge - the old plant melts down if it loses power, because the core requires active cooling.
It's not nuclear power that scares me or many of those who live here. It's the morons in control of them.
The Gnome screen reader - Orca - is developed by Sun for OpenSolaris. For me, and others facing visual impairment, this is a biggie. Hopefully, if OpenSolaris does fall by the wayside, Oracle will keeps some of the gems like Orca, and port them to Oracle's version of Linux.
However, this is all very scary. Oracle has not been known as a good open-source contributor, like Sun or IBM. Now they own mysql, Orca, Java, and a ton of key open-source technologies, not to mention OpenSolaris.
Anyone else scared?
The number of bits in a petabyte: 9*10^15. Age of the universe in seconds: 4*10^18. So, a room with 480 of these servers could hold that much data. My entire life, I've used the age of the universe in seconds as a number so huge, that we could just assume nothing would ever approach it.
The meaning of life: you contribute on the order of 1 bit towards the evolution of the human genome. Kinda makes me feel small.
So... Microsoft having potential patent claims against your free compiler doesn't bother you? How about even using a "portable" language defined and controlled by Microsoft? Sure, if you only care about Windows, use C#. But Microsoft has a long history of jerking around standards that it controls to make them impossible for competitors to adopt. Consider Internet Explorer, and all the pain we have to go through to be compatible with that beast. How about Microsoft's attack on Open Document Format, and it's insanely huge and complex competing standard which only Microsoft implements? I think RMS has a valid point, and deserves consideration. This is a good place to air such discussions.
I suffer like the author of this thread from trouble getting started on projects. I'm actually in such a state right now. I find music helps a ton, especially earphones that block out other noises. Usually, there's some boring task I have to do to before I get to the fun parts, and I put off that boring stuff as long as possible. At the moment, I just spent nearly two weeks figuring out how to run my computer without vision (I'm losing my central vision). I needed to learn this skill, but of course, my manager would rather that I schedule such time, rather than drop his task for two weeks straight. I'm suppose to be writing tree-control crud. Yuk.
The trick is just getting started. I think I'll stop reading slashdot and try and be productive.
BYD F3DM is a hybrid, and only sold in China to the government and corporations.
The Mitsubishi MiEV is still in research phase, and I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a US version
The Subaru Stella EV is still only a concept car, though it may be sold soon in Japan. Again, good luck getting one here.
AC Propulsion E-Box? Seriously? It's a $55K conversion kit, not a car, and it converts a crummy $15K car into a crummy $70K car.
Subaru Stella is not yet in production, and it'll be a long time before we get to buy them.
So long as we're talking about cool future technologies, I'd include the Volt and Aptera. I hope all these companies make it, but high-volume production is key. Tesla has the lead in this area, and they're further along at developing the technology than any other company.
Tesla is the only company in the world selling production electric cars that are fully street-legal. They started with a $100K car, and now they're doing a $50K car. They have a $30K car planned for after that.
Basically, you need economies of scale to get the cost of these cars down. Tesla's riding that curve, and plans to eventually have cheaper cars than Ford. This is a potentially great place to invest in American innovation, not to mention the environmental benefits or jobs.
Just because I can embed video and sound doesn't make my HTML pages the equivalent of flash. More importantly, Microsoft has "announced" intension to support HTML 5, but there's exactly zero movement so far from the market leader, and a long history of similar unfulfilled promises. Until Microsoft says HTML 5 is the next big thing, it isn't. Sorry, I know it sucks.
The article asks for things that are very hard to deliver.
I was disabled in that I for three years, from 1996 to 1999, I couldn't type due to an entrapment of my ulnar nerves in both elbows. This resulted from using two-key combinations in emacs for years, at break-neck speed, and keeping my elbows bent sharply to reach up to a keyboard. My thumbs would swell up to 50% larger than their normal volume, and anything that touched them caused a lot of pain. Driving, washing my hair, and doing shirt buttons all became painful tasks. The doctor measured a nerve speed degradation through my elbows of something like 50%. He recommended disability, as I'm sure most doctors do.
Instead, since I worked for a great employer at the time (Synplicity), I was allowed to spend "whatever you need" to set up an environment at work where I could continue to function as a programmer. I was given a quiet office, and quiet PC (some of them are damned loud!), the best microphones, and speech recognition software - Dragon Dictate at the time, and later Naturally Speaking. I found I could "mouse" with an Alps touchpad, which sometimes I used with my knuckles. That mouse ability was key, as speech control of 2D position still sucked by 1999. I ran emacs under cygwin (which I could use to control Linux boxes when needed), and wrote 1,600 emacs macros over the 3 year period to improve my job efficiency (by voice). The initial version of HDL Analyst was written almost entirely by voice, as was almost all my work over those years. I was able to get my productivity up to about 80% of what I had when I typed, by my best estimates (lines of code/day, etc).
Here's what I found about voice programming.
1 - It's really hard to talk while solving hard programming problems in your head. Try talking to your friend while coding - it sucks. However, voice coding can become mechanical, just like typing, so you don't have to think about it. This feat alone is at least as hard as learning to type, which is one reason I feel voice controlled systems haven't caught on.
2 - Controlling my specific environment eventually took 1,600 custom commands. If you know 1,600 words in a foreign language, you've got decent grasp of it. So, learning to control your environment by voice is about as difficult as learning a foreign language.
3 - Emacs was part of what caused my injury, but also required for the solution! Without emacs, I don't know what I would have done.
4 - My 1,600 macros are a very personal language. Voice programmers try to share our work, but it's not very useful - we just keep trying to teach each other our own unique language.
There is room for improvement. Context sensitive voice programming where commands being recognized know where the cursor is, and the BNF syntax of the format you're editing would be huge.
Now, for what actually "cured" me (I still have to keep typing below a certain limit per day) - I got married and had a daughter. Wherever my baby was, I wanted to be, so I set up a laptop with Naturally Speaking, and followed her around. The keys on the keyboard have less travel, and cushions at the bottom (not all do!). My elbows are straighter. My stress just evaporated every time I looked at my daughter (most RSI injuries happen during high stress periods - after my divorce in my case). One day I noticed that typing the damned password into Windows stopped hurting, and little by little, I regained typing ability.
Unfortunately for me, it turns out I also have a very rare eye problem, and am going slowly blind (it's similar to macular degeneration). Anyone out there still a successful partially blind programmer? This is a field where I would be willing to volunteer while still able to program.
Thanks for the good advice, which I intend to take. I'm gonna have my wife (a professional writer) go over the site carefully, and then I'll start trying to get people in Carrboro involved.
I'll also reword my daughter's pet-sitting add.
In college, I use to fix video games for pizza and beer... it ways GREAT!